Any photo taken by a digital camera has at least some kind of EXIF data, so this shouldn't be hard to find. The next thing you'll need is a photo with some EXIF data. If you can type system('exiftool') into your R console and not get any text saying 'command not found', you're good to go. In Windows you'll end up with an exiftool.exe file that you should put in your RStudio Project directory (or working directory, if you don't use RStudio). It's available for Windows, Mac, and Unix-oid systems (although it's a little more complicated to install on the unix-oid ones). Using the system() command in R, we can write a simple wrapper around the exiftool command that produces a nice ame with all the information about our image files.įirst thing is first, you're going to need to install exiftool. There is no package available for this, however exiftool, written by Phil Harvey, is a multi-platform command-line interface that extracts this data and outputs in a number of formats. Enter EXIF data, the format in which date/time, GPS, resolution, camera make/model, and a number of other fields are stored within image files. The photos came from a GPS with a camera, but because there were tons of duplicate files, any GPS waypoints they were associated with were lost. If you drag a folder containing image files, this action will not work.Recently I was tasked with organizing a large number of geotagged images extracted from several years of field data. Then, when we run exiftool, we replace dir with the each image file's containing folder name i.e., the folder with the Folder Action attached. Thus basename /Users/me/Pictures/TagIPTC would just yield TagIPTC. dir='$(basename '.')' gets the last portion of the path passed to it.I also was thinking it would be great if I can capture the folder name that the images are in and add that name to the IPTC 'byline'.Įxample: imagesfolder/') gets the path of the filename, without the filename itself (i.e., the dirname of /Users/me/Pictures/TagIPTC/img_2112.jpg would be /Users/me/Pictures/TagIPTC. How do you remove the original file during this process? However, this leaves behind the renamed original image file. I am trying to add IPTC 'BY-line' meta to all images within a folder.Įxiftool -iptc:By-line='mybyline' /Users/username/Desktop/foldername. I am new to Exiftool and have some experience with Mac Terminal.

Exiftool tutorial mac